From the appearance of his first novel,
Appointment in Samarra, in 1934, reviewers and critics had never been easy with or on O'Hara, but their negative litany increased in intensity in the later years of O'Hara's career. In time, the semiannual skirmish between O'Hara's critical contractors and his avid audience took on the rigidity of ritual: one deplored, the other adored. Since O'Hara refused to change his style, his subject matter, and his vision, his readers were delighted, and the critics could only shake their heads over their failure to disturb a relationship that was one of the most profitable and enduring in recent American literary history.
On the other hand, O'Hara's most virulent critical abusers refused to class him with writers such as Mickey Spillane or Ian Fleming; no one called him a hack. Some even expressed grudging admiration for his stubborn dedication to his old-fashioned realist's principles, his plain style, and his scorn for fictive actions consciously echoing archetypal or mythic patterns. O'Hara's skill with dialogue, his verisimilitude, and his handling of detail impressed even his detractors. Indeed, the popularity of John O'Hara's work stands as the most obvious refutation of those literary tastemakers who anathematized as obsolete and unconvincing the methods and insights of the realist writer.
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